Scopes

Design rationale:

Namespacing, i.e. references which look like britain.economy.GDP, should be first class. This doesn't play nicely with the internal representation of names via deBruijn levels; we don't want to do a bunch of math to convert between flattened and nested versions of contexts. Conceptually, we should then switch our identifiers to be lists of deBruijn levels.

But there are also significant subtleties in the translation between named and nameless representations of identifiers. Also in practice if we are referencing something that might change over time, like a C-set, we don't want to use deBruijn levels, because we don't want have to change all of our identifiers when we delete something, so in the rest of this I will instead say "local identifier" instead of deBruijn level to refer to a nameless representation of an identifier.

(the name "local identifier" and also some of this philosophy is taken from chit)

In general, naming is given by a relation between symbols and bindings (as refered to by local identifiers). Each binding may be associated with zero or more symbols, and each symbol might be associated with zero or more bindings.

We name the failure of this relation to be a bijection in several ways.

  • If more than one symbol is related to a single binding, we say that this

binding has aliases. In this case, we should also have a primary alias used as a default.

  • If more than one binding is related to a single symbol, we have name overlap.

Name overlap can be resolved by overloading and shadowing, we will talk about this later on.

  • If no symbol is related to a binding, such as when the binding is created

programmatically, we need nameless references to be able to refer to the binding, which are also created programmatically.

  • If no binding is related to a symbol, then we have a name error; this name

is not valid in the current context and we must throw an error.

The most important thing to get right is name overlap; we discuss this first.

There are two ways in which to resolve name overlap. The first way is via overloading. In overloading, we disambiguate an ambiguous name via its context, for instance what type it is expected to be, or what arguments is it receiving. The second way is via shadowing. In shadowing, a name is resolved by making it point to the "most recently defined" thing with that name.

In GATlab, we handle overloading and shadowing with a notion of scope. Anything which binds variables introduces a scope, for instance a @theory declaration or a context. Each scope is identified with a ScopeTag, which is an opaque identifier (i.e. a UUID). We take this idea from Racket, but we don't need the more complex "scope sets" from Racket because GATs don't need to process the syntax of other GATs; if we start doing this we'll have to rethink the design, but we'll probably have bigger problems too.

Two variables with the same name within a single scope are meant to overload one another. For instance, this is what happens with mcompose in the theory of monoidal categories; it is overloaded for Hom and Ob, and this is what happens with d in the discrete exterior calculus; it is overloaded for all of the (k+1)-forms. Variables in different scopes with the same name shadow one another. When we parse an expression a + b, we do so in an ordered list of scopes, and the most recent scope "wins".

Parsing turns a Symbol into an Ident. The Ident contains the original Symbol for printing, but it also contains a reference to a scope via ScopeTag, and an local identifier ("lid") within that scope. Thus, the name in the Ident is never needed for later stages of programatic manipulation.

Scopes cache the relation between names and bindings, by providing a way to go from binding (as reified by local identifier) to a set of aliases with distinguished primary alias, and to go from name to the set of bindings that have that name that we need to disambiguate between in the case of an overload.

Because Idents are fully unambiguous even without their name, it is also possible to create an Ident with no name, which solves the problem of nameless references.